Salesforce Enablement: Sales Programs Review and Alternatives [2024]

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The Salesforce Enablement Sales Programs is designed to activate seller productivity through programs connected to their daily workflow and sales results. The program enables sales reps with AI-powered training, coaching, resources, and tools needed to do their work. 

Research shows that sales enablement programs can help sellers achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals. Unlike traditional enablement platforms that require sellers to leave their CRM and workflow to be enabled, this solution brings enablement to reps and also provides visualization of revenue metrics so reps understand the metric they’re working towards. 

But…is Salesforce’s Sales Programs the best choice for Salesforce enablement? This Salesforce Enablement sales programs review will cover all necessary information, including the features, pros & cons, and program pricing. You’ll also learn other platform alternatives if you decide Salesforce’s program does not align with your business needs. 

What is Salesforce Enablement? 

Salesforce Enablement is a sales readiness solution built inside Salesforce that offers various enablement programs, such as sales force automation, sales programs, sales AI, sales analytics, and more. 

Enablement is customizable in Salesforce, and businesses can create programs unique to their sales pipeline, processes, products, and services. Through the enablement data model, users can define measures, tasks, program outcomes, milestones, and exercises that will be used to track seller progress.

What is Salesforce’s Sales Programs Tool? 

The Salesforce Sales Programs tool is one of its enablement products. It is built for businesses to provide AI-powered sales programs in sellers' workflows, coaching, feedback on reps' pitches, and improved conversational skills. 

The enablement platform equips sellers with best practices templates developed by a global enablement team. It integrates related sales enablement platforms like a sales cloud for automation, intelligence, and data, conversation insights for sales calls, built-in sales engagement tools, and a revenue intelligence solution with purpose-built analytics. 

With this tool, businesses can set up sales programs in Salesforce Lightning Experience by selecting from a list of available templates and reviewing specific requirements for the program. For example, you can find a template to help sales reps sell new products and customize it to specify milestones, outcomes, and exercises for common sales use cases. 

Salesforce Enablement: Salesforce Sales Program Feature Review

Here are the key features, pros, and cons of the Salesforce sales program:

Salesforce Sales Programs features

  • Guidance Center: Provide program activities and resources like guides, templates, sales scripts, etc., that sales reps can surface as needed

  • AI-powered coaching & feedback: Embed pitch practices and coaching guidance directly in Salesforce
  • Conversation insights & milestones: Improve sales reps performance on calls using call intelligence data and conversation milestones for talk and listen-to rations, product mentions, and talk tracks
salesforce conversation

  • Revenue milestones: Embed specific rep tasks in sales programs and configure revenue milestones for possible productivity gaps 
  • In-app guidance: Provide step-by-step guidance for complex processes and program reminders/updates
  • Program analytics: Track the progress and impact of sales programs with dashboards and analytics that reveal activities driving revenue
analytics
  • Program builder: Create and launch sales programs tied to specific sales goals with a no-code builder inside Salesforce
program builder
  • Templates: Design best practices templates for business use cases, pipeline generation, cross-selling, upselling, etc.
templates

  • Automated program enrollment: Trigger automatic enrollment for sellers into programs based on seller performance and challenges

Salesforce Sales Programs Pros

Wondering how the Salesforce Sales Programs can benefit your business? Here’s how:

  • Advanced reporting and analytics 
  • Drag and drop simplicity when building programs 
  • Robust data protection measures
  • Scalability

Salesforce Sales Programs Cons

According to reviews on G2 and Capterra, these are some of the cons that users have complained about:

  • Some users on Capterra say Salesforce is relatively expensive, especially for small businesses
  • Customers in reviews on G2, have issues with Salesforce’s steep learning curve
  • Compatibility issues when integrating existing tech stack
  • Program customization requires technical expertise
  • User reviews reveal that the platform has a clunky UI that can be a bit confusing 

Sales Programs Pricing

Salesforce offers two pricing options for the sales programs:

  • Sales Programs: This pricing option is billed annually at $100/user/month. It is designed for selling within a CRM. It provides access to revenue milestones, guidance center, and enablement analytics.  
  • Partner Tracks: This option allows sellers to activate partners with outcome-based enablement. It provides in-app guidance, milestones & outcomes, and enablement analytics. The pricing is not available on Salesforce’s website. 

Best Salesforce Enablement Sales Programs Alternatives

Have you been searching for the best alternatives to Salesforce’s Sales Programs? Here they are:

1. Spekit

Spekit is a generative AI-powered, just-in-time sales enablement solution designed to optimize the workflow of revenue teams. The platform helps businesses to empower their sales teams and turn every sales rep into a top performer through customizable sales playbooks, processes, templates, and training delivered wherever and whenever sales reps work. 

Spekit has multiple use cases, including employee onboarding and training, sales content management, change management, tool & process adoption, tool implementation, sales playbooks and processes, and more. The platform enables you to provide every resource your sales reps need to sell better and tie their selling outcomes to business, sales, and revenue metrics. 

Spekit integrates easily with Salesforce, Salesforce CPQ, Lightning, NPSP, Salesforce Service Cloud, and Financial Services Cloud. It eliminates friction by intelligently embedding training, enablement, and resources directly where sales reps are working in Salesforce and automatically syncs changes between Salesforce with Spekit to ensure key fields are always updated with the correct definitions, terms, and processes.

With Spekit, you can give reps usage guidance into platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Clari, and even create walkthroughs for sales reps based on common sales use cases. Spekit’s core is enablement right in the flow of work, meaning your sales reps won’t have to leave their platforms, i.e., Slack, Chrome extension, etc to be enabled.

Key Features:

  • Salesforce integration: Integrate Spekit with Salesforce in just one click and allow reps to surface important materials as they work in Salesforce
  • Just-in-time-learning: With just-in-time learning, your reps don’t have to leave their workflow to be enabled. They can learn on the go, increasing retention rates and supporting contextual learning
  • SpekitAI: An AI-powered assistant for automating sales content creation, summarizing lengthy documents into bite-sized content, and translating all content to multiple languages
  • Knowledge base: Manage all sales content and resources from a single location that reps can easily access when they need to learn or share sales content with prospects/customers
  • Speks: Create easy-to-read, bite-sized learning materials or sales content 
  • Flows: Design walkthroughs to guide sales reps on processes and use cases
  • Topics: Organize and group Speks into categories so sellers can quickly pick out what they need
  • Spotlights: Keep everyone in the know with in-app alerts for announcements and time-sensitive information
  • SmartSend: Enable sales reps to respond to prospects at the right time using unique shareable links that alert reps when a prospect engages with sales materials
  • Browser extension: Bring enablement into sales reps' workflow by embedding Spekit in Chrome browser extension. 

Visit Spekit to learn more. 

2. SalesLoft

Salesloft is an enablement platform that’s best for managing revenue workflows. It is an AI-powered revenue orchestration solution that equips marketing and sales teams with tools like sales call tracking and lead management and offers courses/certifications to upskill sellers. 

Salesloft has an AI-powered signal-to-action tool for prioritizing sellers' workflow, mapping buyer signals in real time, and consolidating their tech stack into one platform. It offers APIs for custom integrations with other enablement software.

salesloft workflow

Key Features:

  • Pipeline management and forecasting 
  • AI-powered buyer engagement platform 
  • Sales forecasting tool
  • Rhythm for prioritizing seller workflows

3. Hubspot

Hubspot is a customer enablement platform that provides resources, software, and integrations businesses need to connect their sales, marketing, and customer-facing teams to training, coaching, and resources. It has various hubs: sales, marketing, service, content, operations, and commerce, all connected to a single CRM database for teams to view customer data at each stage of the customer journey.

The Hubspot academy gives sales teams access to pre-built selling courses, training, and coaching. The platform also provides developer tools for building customized integrations and websites. It integrates with Gmail, Shopify, Mailchimp, and Zapier.

Key Features:

  • ClearBit by Hubspot to clean public data into standardized data sets 
  • AI website builder and content writer 
  • Marketing automation, analytics, and lead generation
  • Knowledge base 

4. Revenue.io

Revenue.io offers enablement for pipeline generation, sales engagement, quota attainment, sales coaching, and rep ramp time. It is an AI-powered platform that helps businesses give real-time guidance to sales reps and customer success teams. The platform automates sales engagement, enabling reps to keep track of customer conversations and follow up properly. 

Revenue.io provides solutions for sales reps to target customers at the right time and send personalized pitches or sales content. The platform integrates with productivity tools like Salesforce, Zoom, and Gmail.

revenue summary

Key Features:

  • Sales analytics tool
  • Call recording software for conversation intelligence
  • Revenue intelligence solution
  • Sales cadence software for tracking buyers

5. Reply.io

Reply.io is a sales engagement solution designed to automate customer outreach and scale multi-channel customer acquisition. It helps businesses build multi-channel sequences for seller workflow from the prospecting stage through customer touchpoints and engagement scenarios. It provides an AI sales assistant to help sales reps compose emails and handle basic customer responses. 

Reply.io is useful for inbound and outbound sales, account-based sales, agency prospecting, and recruitment. It integrates with Hubspot and Salesforce and lets users build their own tech stack using no-code tools and APIs. 

 Key Features:

  • Email health check
  • Google postmaster integration
  • Social network automation
  • Reporting and analytics 

6. SalesOS

SalesOS has an enterprise sales program framework for businesses to manage sellers, pitches, and pipeline stages. It helps improve sales pipeline health through customized solutions, from assessing your existing sales program to building and deploying a customized sales operating blueprint. 

Key Features:

  • Profit management 
  • Talent management 
  • Pipeline management 
  • Communications management 

7. Groove

Groove is a sales and revenue enablement platform acquired by Clari. It unifies a business's revenue enablement efforts on a single platform using tools like a custom-built go-to-market strategy engine, AI-assisted selling, sales prospecting, and automated lead follow-up. 

Groove automates seller workflow using triggers that can be set up to perform time-sensitive tasks or actions. It provides native integrations to Salesforce and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

Key Features:

  • Workflow automation
  • A/B testing 
  • Conversation intelligence 
  • Analytics 

8. Showpad

Showpad is an enterprise operating system that enables sellers with the training, content, and materials needed to engage buyers. It offers AI-powered solutions for sales content management, buyer engagement, seller coaching, and analytics. 

Showpad’s core is its shared spaces designed for collaboration between buyers and sellers. The platform further supports collaboration through an open API and preconfigured integrations that fit into existing workflows and processes. 

Key Features:

  • Sales content management 
  • Seller and enablement analytics
  • Guided selling 
  • 360 immersive showrooms for buyer engagement 

9. Allego

Allego is a learning and enablement platform that works best for training sales enablement teams. It is designed for hybrid sales teams to access the necessary skills, content, and knowledge. Sellers can leverage peer-to-peer learning to boost retention rates and receive feedback on their engagements with customers through conversation intelligence. 

Allego supports revenue objectives like activating seller channels, designing digital buyer experiences, and launching new products and processes. The platforms integrate with Dropbox, Hubspot, and Cloudcall.  

Key Features:

  • Digital Sales Rooms for engaging buyers
  • Sales content management 
  • Conversation intelligence tool
  • Analytics and reporting tool

10. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is built to enable sales reps to sell more easily with AI-powered enablement, automation, and real-time insights built into their flow of work. It helps businesses prioritize their pipeline through AI scoring models and data visualizations of prospects/customers. 

It integrates with all other Microsoft 365 apps so reps can sync customer data across their tech stack.

Key Features:

  • Customer-specific email draft generator
  • Real-time insights 
  • Copilot for generating summaries of customer details
  • AI-based scoring models  

Choose the Best Alternative to Salesforce’s Sales Programs Tool

If you’ve evaluated the Salesforce Sales Programs, but it is relatively expensive, has a steep learning curve delaying reps’ adoption, or has compatibility issues with your existing tech stack, you should try an alternative platform that offers all the features and functionality you need to give your sales reps AI-powered sales enablement. 

Spekit is a great alternative to Salesforce’s Sales Programs tool. This leading sales enablement platform centralizes and automatically surfaces the content, training, and answers sales reps need to sell smarter and faster in any tool and workflow. 

With Spekit’s infinitely easier content creation, versatile access, and real-time knowledge surfacing, your sales reps will thank you for simplifying their day-to-day processes and will surely achieve whatever sales or revenue metric their workflow is connected to. 

Plus, Spekit integrates seamlessly with Salesforce to enable sales reps to access and surface whatever materials they need while working in Salesforce without leaving the platform. It is the only Salesforce digital adoption platform providing enablement in the flow of work. With a direct, one-click integration, you can set up and maximize your Salesforce investment ROI.  

Spekit’s clients have been able to cut rep onboarding time to less than 90 days, overcome siloed knowledge, grow their sales team, and skyrocket seller productivity. 

Visit Spekit to learn more

About the author

Elle Brayton
Director, Content & Communications
Elle is a boy momma 2x, brand builder, storyteller, growth hacker, and marketing leader with 12+ years of experience scaling SaaS B2B organizations.
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